I spent a lot of time last night thinking about my questions on Jesus’ divinity, my problems with The Fall, but mostly my sense that the world demands you make a choice. If I go with the Trinitarians, that feels… not in line with what seems right to me, and it certainly takes me away from the UU faith, which seems to describe my own core beliefs within its principles. If I go with Emerson and the Transcendentalists, it puts Jesus squarely in the past-tense, and that feels somehow too limiting. If I hang with Channing, it brings me back to needing to believe that, like Lewis, the story starts with The Fall. To deny altogether also seems false to me – while there’s no question that Jesus got a lot of good press and good luck in the course of human history (Paul, Constantine, Clovis) – there is still something beyond ‘he was nothing but a teacher.’ And to see him just as another aspect or archetype of the divine is insanely limiting to my mind.
There seems to be no clear cut answer, no side to choose that satisfies my conflicting thoughts and searching heart. And it is at this point that I get choked up and tears start to roll. And I don’t know why. I guess there’s a part of me that feels like I can’t move on until I have settled this question. Who is/was Jesus? How does his life, teachings, state of being relate to mine?
What surprises me most is that it matters.
I have spent decades not worried about it, not relating to Jesus in any way. I know I put him out of my mind after I left the pentacostals… and really, never looked back. And there is a part of me that wonders if he would be on my mind if it weren’t for you. If you had been another UU, or pagan, or Jewish – even if you had helped me reconnect to God, would he have come up? Am I a product of influences? Or… in as much as you are a gift from God, is part of that gift raising the question of Jesus? If that’s the case, then I suspect I’m right on track. If not, well, hmmm….
I suppose part of my crisis is seeking the answer to the question of why he might have existed at all. If you take away The Fall as the raison d’etre, then what is the reason? Love seems too… simple. Forgiveness? Hope? Life? Meaning? I don’t know…maybe that is tonight’s meditation. “Daughter of Israel” feels an apt moniker today.
Deep thoughts… with an odd melancholy attached…
